"In this century, we are being haunted by some philosophical ghosts came into being in the last century.   Christians need a Christian worldview that is based on truth.  There is a difference between knowledge and truth.  For example, knowledge will double and triple but genuine truth does not. 

Young people go to school and study facts.  But there is a difference between facts and truth.  Facts are like the recipe.  Truth is like the meal.  Digest the truth and it will change your life.  God wants us to have truth.  Why did God give us the Bible?  Jesus said in Jn 17 "Thy word is truth."  Why did God send us the Holy Spirit?  He's called in the Bible the spirit of truth.  Why did the Messiah come, the Lord Jesus?  He said "I am the truth". Why do we have churches?  Churches are the pillar and the ground of the truth.  Truth is to your spirit what food is to your body, what light is to your eyes, and what sound is to your ears.  To know truth is to know God.  And to know God is to know truth.

Secular education is not enough.  Our young people need a Christian worldview.  When you have a Christian worldview, you'll find out that all of these facts intersect in truth.  And that it's all related.  You don't just niche out your church life and put it over here, and think that none of the rest of these thing matter.

The marks of a good education is, that it is so interwoven with truth that all things begin to intersect and cohere together.  There is a famine in the world for truth.  Jobs friends encouraged him to appeal to the human mind--an ancient appeal to humanism (Job 8:8)  Humanism is not new, it's one of the dustiest, mustiest things around. 

How did we get to this state in America?  A pastor prayed a prayer to the Kansas House of Representatives: 

Heavenly Father, we come before You today to ask Your forgiveness and seek Your direction and guidance.

We know Your Word says, "Woe on those who call evil good,"
but that's exactly what we have done.
We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values.

We confess that:
We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your Word
and called it pluralism;

We have worshipped other gods
and called it multiculturalism;

We have endorsed perversion
and called it an alternative lifestyle;

We have exploited the poor
and called it the lottery;

We have neglected the needy
and called it self-preservation;

We have rewarded laziness
and called it welfare;

We have killed our unborn
and called it choice;

We have shot abortionists
and called it justifiable;

We have neglected to discipline our children
and called it building self- esteem;

We have abused power
and called it political savvy;

We have coveted our neighbor's possessions
and called it ambition;

We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography
and called it freedom of expression;

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers
and called it enlightenment.

Search us, O God, and know our hearts today;
try us and see if there be some wicked way in us;
cleanse us from every sin and set us free.

Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas,
and who have been ordained by You, to govern this great state.
Grant them Your wisdom to rule
and may their decisions direct us to the center of Your will.

I ask it in the name of Your Son, the Living Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

What is wrong in America? We are in a crisis. No longer do we believe in absolute truth. If you go back to a period, it began in 1962 to 1982, the courts in 20 years reversed the principle of "One Nation Under God" that had been the principle of American History. In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale Justice Hugo Black ruled that voluntary prayer in schools was unconstitutional. In 1963, in Abington Township School District v. Schempp Justice Thomas Clark set in motion the dismantling of Bible reading. Then, in 1980 the posting of the Ten Commandments was declared unconstitutional. Then came 1982, and the courts prohibited the teaching of creationism--that men, boys and girls were created by Almighty God. Twenty years it took them to expel God from the public schools and tell him not to come back.

What has been the result of that? Children need permission to have medication, but aided by high school counselors, they may have an abortion and to kill a baby. We are in serious times. God has been so systematically excluded a study by the U.S. Department of Education headed up by Dr. Vitz, a professor of psychology at New York university was released to the American public. It was a study centered on text books used by millions of boys and girls in public schools. After the study, Dr. Vitz said: "Those responsible for these books appear to have a deep seated fear of any form of active contemporary Christianity, especially serious, committed Protestantism. This fear has led the authors to deny and repress the importance of this kind of religion in American life. This nature of the bias is clear. Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks. The exclusion is particularly disturbing because it is found in a system paid for by taxpayers and one that claims moreover to be committed to impartial knowledge and accuracy. Textbooks are so written as to present a systematic denial of the history, heritage, beliefs, and values of a very large segment of the American people."

That is not a preacher saying that. That is a report by a professor of psychology of New York University, funded by the United States Department of Education. There has been a systematic move to exclude those things we find dear and what we believe to be the foundation of this nation. And as a result, we see values clarification being put into schools. We see values neutral sex education put into schools. We see dispensing of birth control devices and condoms being put into schools. We see abortion counseling without parental notification being put into schools. We see homosexuality being introduced in textbooks as an acceptable lifestyle.

How did all of this happen?  What has happened to America? 

Roger Friend is quite a scholar.  Remember Job's friends made an appeal for him to inquire of the philosophers of yesterday?  Who are some of the philosophers of yesterday that have so skewed American thinking today?  What happened in the 1800s, in the 19th century?  Five men shaped and molded what has happened in America today. 

The first was Georg Friedrich Hegel.  He lived in the 1820s.  For 1500 years people had accepted without question the fact of moral absolutes.  That right was right and wrong was wrong universally.  Everywhere people thought that murder was wrong.  Everywhere adultery was thought to be wrong and if it were not thought to be wrong it was only an aberration.  The consensus was that there is a fixed standard of right and wrong.  But Hegel came along and he rejected moral absolutes.  He had what he called a "dialectic theory".  Dialecticism is simply an argument.  He had a reasoned argument, a dialectic theory.  And what was his dialectic theory?  He said all history is made up of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.  Thesis is an idea, a proposition that people believed to be true and they hold that idea until somebody comes along with an opposing idea, an antithesis.  So, these two get into a battle--a thesis and an antithesis.  They battle back and forth until each of them gives a little and somewhere in the middle you come to a synthesis, which is a thesis and an antithesis coming together.  That synthesis becomes the new thesis.  That becomes the new accepted model for truth.  Hegel said therefore there are no moral absolutes.  He's not talking about biological evolution, he's talking about philosophical and social evolution--that society is always in a flux.  It's always moving and there is no fixed standard of right and wrong.  Hegel said that ideas come under the heading of survival of the strongest.  The strongest idea wins and therefore history is evolutionary and there can be no absolutes.

After Hegel in the 1820s there came along another man in the 1830s.  This man's name was Ludwig Feuerback.  He was another German philosopher.  One of these things begins to build upon another.  Feuerback said if there are no moral absolutes--if Hegel is right (and he accepted that Hegel was right)--then, there can be no God.  Because if there is a God, then that God would have absolute truth.  So, he said that there can be no God.  He said man that creates the idea of God.  Man is not made in the image of God but God is in the imagination of man.  All that moral flux, this no moral absolutes--causes a deep insecurity in the heart and mind of man.  So, Feuerback said that God is created in the imagination of man.  Man simply invents God.  He said, "Christianity has in fact long vanished.  Not only from reason but from the life of mankind. It is nothing more than a fixed idea." 

Are we haunted by that ghost today?  Yes, that's called humanism.  Humanism sounds so much like humanitarianism.  But there is a vast difference between humanism and humanitarianism.  Humanitarianism means we love one another, we care for one another, and we love the human species that God has made--man.  But humanism makes man the center, the circumference, the sum total of everything, it has no room for God.  It is a fine sounding name.  But, it is atheism just simply wearing another coat. 

The third person that we are being haunted by today is Karl Marx.  Marx built on the work of Hegel and Feuerback.  He said, now if this is true--if there are no absolutes and therefore, there is no God, then what is the future and the purpose of mankind?  Where are we going?  As a result, Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848.  He took Hegel's dialectic argument and he called it dialectical materialism (another word for communism).  What he believed was that capitalism--the right to own property, and the right to be productive for yourself--was wrong.  That, he said, is the thesis.  The antithesis is the desire for equity and fairness in the hearts and minds of the working people.  He said if you take that thesis and that antithesis, you will come to a synthesis which will be socialism and communism.  That's Marxism.  That's Hegelian philosophy and the ideas of Feuerback put together because communism is godless.  It's not just another form of economy, it is unspeakably immoral because it does not recognize the worth, the dignity, of the individual.  The individual is nothing.  Marx said that they way to set all of this about is a revolution.  He said it doesn't matter if there is suffering.  He believed that there must be violent change.  He said that we must be like a foreign body within the existing system that will accelerate its death.  So, millions and millions were put to death under godless communism.  40 to 50 million were executed.  Why?  Because there is no God.  If there is not God, there is no fixed standard of right and wrong.  Therefore, we as human beings, all we have is materialism.  And what we've got to do is to somehow bring in a humanist, godless utopia.  Revolution was necessary and here is what Marx said, "The suffering and sacrifice of violent change constitutes the price that mankind has to pay to have any essential progress at all.  So, he said, we want change.  We want it violently.  Marxism and Leninism affects American life today.  

Here's the fourth man that has skewed the worldview.  His name is Charles Darwin.  Charles Darwin wrote the Origin of the Species in 1859, and the Decent of Man in 1871.  He came to the conclusion that man is the product of evolution.  If there is no God, there can be no fixed standard of right and wrong--and if there is no God, then how did we get here?  How do we explain our existance?  Evolution is not a science.  It is a philosophy.  It is the next best guess of the mind that cannot accept divine creation.  Darwin went on to write that we, ourselves, are the product of mere chance.  We as human beings cannot escape the evolutionary web. 

Another philosopher a little later on described what Darwin taught us.  "With this single argument, the mystery of the universe is explained.  The deity is annulled.  And a new era of infinite knowledge is ushered in." And from that time on, man has been endeavoring to make a monkey of himself thanks to Charles Darwin and those that believed him.

The fifth of these five men that haunt us today is a man named Sigmund Freud.  Freud lived from 1856 to 1939.  He was the one who put the final bow on the whole thing.  He put the final touches to the evolutionary model. Feuerback said that we created the idea of God because of the insecurities that Hegel brought about that said there are no absolutes.  Freud asked, where do we get the idea of God?  What kind of a God do we conjure up?  He said our idea of God comes from our childhood father and we conceive of God as we would conceive of our childhood father when we were children.  He was the father of psychoanalysis.  He taught that mankind is motivated chiefly by pleasure--specifically, by sexual pleasure and eroticism.  For Freud almost everything begins and ends with sex.  He felt if mankind is repressed in society by his/her erotic urges, if people are failed to be allowed to fulfill their sexual desires, they may get a neurosis.  That is the reason we see perversion.  The filth, the debauchery that we see in society today, that roots back to the extreme permissiveness that came out of Freudian psychology.  You see it in raising children.  We are told not to repress children.  After all, you don't want to warp the little thing.  

What happened when these five men brought these philosophies?  It took less than a hundred years for them to come to fruition in this century.  In 1924, a man who was a student of:  Hegel, Feuerback, Marx--had a name--Adolf Hitler.  He thought he had an idea better than Marx, Nazism.  He wrote Mein Kampf.  He wrote:  "No more than natures desires the mating with weaker with stronger individuals..." there you see the survival of the fittest; we're talking about Darwin there.  "...even less does she desire the blending of a higher and a lower race."  Hitler was the original racist.  "...since if she did, her whole work of higher breeding over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years might be ruined with one blow.  All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally created race died from blood poisoning that is intermarrying.  The man who creates the culture must be preserved.  Preservation is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and the strongest in this world."  That's just another way of saying survival of the fittest.  Then, Hitler said, "Those who want to live, let them fight and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.  Even if this is hard, this is how it is."  That lead to the gas ovens. 

You say, the gas ovens were terrible.  What about the abortion business today?  What about taking the little babies--the weakest of all creatures and because they are weak, because they cannot defend themselves, they are liquidated.  Do you know what Hitler's argument for the extermination of Jews was?  He reclassified them as non-persons.  Do you know what we are doing to the little babies today?  We are re-classifying them as non-persons.  Can you imagine someone saying, I personally am against the cremation of human beings but what one does in his own personal gas chamber is his business.  I'm for choice.

This is the idea of survival of the strongest.  How can "Dr. Death"--Dr. Kevorkain do what he does over and over and over again?  Because these people are weak.  They're suffering.  Many people say, get them out of the way.  They want to die.  Help them to die.  It's only a little step for doctors who will put to death little babies in the womb and be paid for it, will, with a needle and a syringe help some of us to get out of the way in this crowded world because it's just what we call the survival of the fittest. 

These ideas have been around for a long time. Actually, they were born in the pit of hell.  But there was a resurgence of these kinds of ideas in the last century and now we've sown the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind. 

Am I discouraged?  No, and I'll tell you why.  The Bible says that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty to God unto the pulling down of strongholds.  God has given us kingdom authority.  Jesus said, behold, I give you authority over all the power of the enemy.  Do you know the one thing that they do not have?--is truth.  Let me tell you, the other thing they don't have?  They don't have the Holy Spirit.  So what we need to do is take the word of truth and the spirit of truth and hold up the Christ of truth and we need to get out of the boat with both feet.  We need to know who we are, what we believe, and why we believe it.  We don't have to be ashamed of what we believe.  There are good answers to these things and the Bible says we are to be ready to give answer to those who ask us of these things.

I am convinced that there is not a lot wrong in America that could not be changed radically and quickly if we had a generation of preachers across this land who would stand in the pulpits of God anointed with the Holy Spirit and a heart full of love from a pure life who would preach and teach.   Edited notes based on sermon by Adrienne Rogers:  Ghosts That Haunt Us.

Ghosts That Haunt Us (MP3 right click and 'save target as' to download) Adrienne Rogers